Source:
https://scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3082630/if-you-think-you-have-it-bad-amid-coronavirus-millions-migrant
Comment/ Opinion

If you think you have it bad amid the coronavirus, millions of migrant workers have it far worse

  • Even at the best of times, the world’s 164 million international migrant workers tend to get a raw deal. In a time of coronavirus, many have lost their jobs and are unable to send home remittances that their families and countries rely on
Migrant workers are pictured outside their rooms at a dormitory in Singapore designated as an isolation area amid the Covid-19 outbreak. Photo: Reuters

There seems no nook or cranny where the Covid-19 pandemic is not wreaking havoc. If those who have just lost their jobs or been furloughed feel stressed and unlucky, spare a thought for migrant workers and the families who rely on their remittances.

Even at the best of times, the world’s 164 million international migrant workers tend to get a raw deal, whether they are Mexican seasonal farm workers in California, Indian construction workers in Saudi Arabia, or domestic helpers across East Asia.

The plight of China’s 280 million internal migrant workers, and a further 40 million internal migrants in India, is frequently no better. Trapped in low-paid jobs in the informal economy, often without access to local health care systems or routine job protection, they are out of sight, out of mind for most government policymakers.

That seems to be doubly true as the pandemic freezes the world economy and stretches health sectors to the limits even in the wealthiest of nations. Whether the workers are migrants from Bihar labouring on a construction site in Mumbai, Philippine retail assistants in Dubai, or Ukrainian farm workers in Russia, migrant jobs are being lost on a massive scale.

Suddenly without incomes, they can no longer afford to stay where they are. Even if they have savings for an air ticket, lockdowns and quarantines mean they are unable to fly home.

Unable to meet even subsistence needs in the migrant economy where they are trapped, they have the additional stress of families back home unable to receive the remittances that many entirely rely on.

Excluding the domestic remittances from migrant workers in China and India, a new report from the World Bank, “Covid-19 Crisis through a Migration Lens”, predicts that remittances will this year fall by about 20 per cent to US$450 billion, from a record US$554 billion last year.

For millions of poor families, and for a large number of developing economies, this will be a heavy additional burden to that of coping with the pandemic itself. As foreign investment flows to the world’s poorer countries are estimated to have more than halved since 2008, remittances will become the single most important source of foreign earnings, the World Bank says.

While such remittances do not amount to a huge share of GDP in large economies like China or Mexico, for many other economies the importance of remittances can be huge.

In our own region, the Philippines has over 10 million overseas workers remitting US$35 billion last year, accounting for 9.9 per cent of gross domestic product and putting foreign investment inflows of around US$10 billion in the shade. Up to one-third of the country’s population relies – sometimes entirely – on remittances from these migrant workers.

While Nepal received much less than the Philippines in remittances in dollar terms – about US$8 billion – this amounted to 27 per cent of the country’s GDP, underpinning the livelihoods of an even larger share of the 28 million population.

In Central Asia, Ukraine receives US$15.8 billion in remittances a year, accounting for 10.5 per cent of GDP, while for Kyrgyzstan, US$2.4 billion in remittances amounts to 29 per cent of GDP.

Challenges facing these Central Asian economies are of particular concern to the World Bank’s Migration and Remittances Team: their migrant workers are mainly working in Russia, where – putting the pandemic aside – a crash in oil earnings and a collapse in the rouble are expected to have a particularly severe impact on migrant jobs. They predict remittances down by 28 per cent this year.

Beyond the pandemic, the crash in global oil prices is also expected to affect migrant workers in the Gulf Cooperation Council economies that include Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and who account for about 14 per cent of all migrant workers worldwide.

A separate concern is that migrant workers are likely to be more severely hit by Covid-19. This may not be surprising in the slums that are home to so many millions of internal migrant workers in cities like Mumbai, but it has been more surprising that Singapore’s resurgence of coronavirus cases has come in 43 dormitories that house an estimated 200,000 migrant workers. These dormitories have accounted for almost three-quarters of Singapore’s cases.

In Taiwan, there are similar concerns that an estimated 50,000 undocumented migrant workers might expose the community to a resurgence of Covid-19 cases, because these illegal workers are reluctant to report illness for fear of being expelled. There have been calls for an amnesty for these illegals to pre-empt a new outbreak.

Even for migrant workers still in jobs, the pandemic has triggered new problems with remittances. Already, the World Bank has voiced concern over the high cost of remittance fees – these average 6.8 per cent worldwide, and are even higher across East Asia.

But as lockdowns have been enforced, remittance companies have in many economies been closed down or had hours reduced, because they are regarded as non-essential services. So, even with money in their pockets, many migrant workers have found themselves unable to remit cash to needy families back home.

There is a sad paradox in the challenges facing migrant workers: anti-immigration prejudices are at historic highs, even though there are acute manpower shortages on farms, and across many health systems.

As thousands of local workers lose their jobs, or are put on unpaid leave, there is likely to be limited sympathy for the appalling plight of these millions of migrant workers who are providing lifelines for rural families across many of the world’s poorest countries, while tolerating wages and working conditions that few locals could contemplate.

The World Bank report notes with a sense of resignation: “If discrimination and xenophobic attitudes affected migrants before, the current crisis has exacerbated such social tensions.”

The price we will pay is more deaths worldwide, more severe economic impacts on many of the world’s poorer countries, and a longer, tougher challenge of bringing the pandemic under control. That is the sad insight revealed through the World Bank’s “Migration Lens”.

David Dodwell researches and writes about global, regional and Hong Kong challenges from a Hong Kong point of view

Help us understand what you are interested in so that we can improve SCMP and provide a better experience for you. We would like to invite you to take this five-minute survey on how you engage with SCMP and the news.